How can I improve the diagnostic information available in Microsoft Store crash reports (Partner Center Health Report)?

123244 235 Reputation points
2026-07-08T17:06:44.2066667+00:00

Hello! I'm publishing applications through Microsoft Store (MSIX packages) and using Partner Center Health Reports to investigate crashes reported by users.

One issue I frequently encounter is that many crash reports contain very little useful diagnostic information. For example, instead of a meaningful call stack I sometimes only get something like:

Frame Image Function Offset 
0 App HANG_ACTIVATION 0x0000000000000000 
1 unknown.dll [.ecxr] 0x0000000000000000

or the stack consists almost entirely of unknown.dll, KernelBase.dll, or other native Windows components without any application methods.

This makes it extremely difficult to identify the root cause of the problem.

My questions are:

  1. What determines how much information is collected and displayed in Partner Center crash reports?
  2. Are there any best practices for increasing the amount or quality of diagnostic information available in Microsoft Store crash reports?
  3. Besides uploading symbol packages (.appxsym / PDBs), are there any additional steps that can improve stack traces or minidumps?
  4. Is there anything that can be configured in Partner Center itself to obtain more detailed crash reports?
  5. Are there recommended application-side techniques (logging, WER integration, exception handling, telemetry, etc.) that make Store crash reports significantly more useful?
  6. Is it possible to influence the type or completeness of the minidumps collected by Windows Error Reporting for Store applications?

I'm not asking about a specific framework. The same issue appears with WPF, UWP, and WinUI applications distributed through Microsoft Store, so I'm primarily interested in platform-level best practices rather than framework-specific solutions.

I'd appreciate any advice from developers who have experience diagnosing production crashes through Microsoft Partner Center or Windows Error Reporting.

Microsoft Partner Center | Other
0 comments No comments

Your answer

Answers can be marked as 'Accepted' by the question author and 'Recommended' by moderators, which helps users know the answer solved the author's problem.